Bread

Working for crumbs 

Billy Joel sings in Uptown Girl about "living in her white bread world".

Which got me thinking about bread.

Back in the very olden days, a person's stature was symbolized by the kind of bread they ate. Bread was there for every meal in some form. The ale that was the sustaining drink back in the days of prehistory was made from fermented grain...the same grain that was pounded into powder to make rudimentary bread. Of course, this bread was more cracker like and rough and had little real taste. Sometimes this hard bread was used as a plate or trencher so that the cooked meat and juices drained into the bread which was sometimes eaten at table or given to the servants or animals as food.

This was back in prehistory and later into the times when there were the rich and the poor...several centuries to be sure.

And, funny thing, the coarsely ground wheat or barley or rye grain made crude, rough bread. If the grain was ground for long times and gradually got lighter in texture and color, the bread made from this lighter flour was given to the rich or upper classes. The peasants who didn't have lots of time to grind grain or even purchase it, made their bread of the darker, less refined flour.

Time passes. Grinding grain became less arduous. The oxen probably appreciated this. Machines found their way into mills, the flour produced became less pricey and the more common people could occasionally afford lighter bread. It took a long time before Wonder Bread or Silvercup reached the typical home. 

Foreigners liked the dark grainy bread of their homelands. They enjoyed rye and barley bread, or baguettes and stuck with bakers from their homelands. They did NOT favor white bread because it represented those who could and/or did oppress them. 

So, when Billy Joel sings about his love for the uptown girl, he considers himself a poor working guy in love with a rich bitch.

She lives in her White Bread world, one that he himself, as a modern day peasant, doesn't have.

Once, I was given the opportunity to speak to a lawyer in a divorce case. One of my friends was getting rid of her husband and I told the lawyer that the only reason the guy married her was because she was white bread and he was the son of immigrants.

The lawyer claimed not to know what I meant by white bread. So I had to explain to him the social difference and how having a wife who was upper class could help the husband attract better clients to his profession.

The lawyer was bullshitting when he said he needed me to explain, but I did. He ran right back to his client and told him what I had said.

Ran into the divorced husband months later and he brought up my observation...he still didn't get the meaning, but it was there.  Sometimes nonwhitebread folks don't like the distinction.

Despite my last name, I grew up not very white bread at all, except for the fact that Wonder Bread helped build strong bodies Twelve Ways and my mother wanted us to have the best bread.

The best bread money could buy.

So we did.

Fed Up

Thinking of grievances

I'm tired of being taken advantage of. 

Turns out somebody stole the pump from our pool. It was there, then it was gone. It's not a little piece of machinery, it is pretty heavy and we need it for our swimming pool...the only thing we have to relieve us in summer. Well, I don't use it, but everybody else does.

Then I got to thinking of the things that have been taken from our family. Karyn had an entire stack of Scholastic books stolen from her desk in third grade. Nobody did anything about it.

In the Army, I had a rain head-covering stolen from me. Called a havelock, I think. I don't remember much because I had it and then I didn't. I got shit for not having it, but somebody else enjoyed it.

So many things have been taken from us.

My good platter that had brownies for the singers. Gone.

And then, there is the "you can donate this, Mrs. Peterson, because you don't work." I was a working writer and editor and my time didn't matter to anyone. I was a Girl Scout leader and home room mother and still got asked to make stuff and be in the classroom and library AND work in the house and work on my stories that did get published.

No, I had to make sandwiches for the First Communion group while the other mothers got to bring in a bottle of soda.

Well, this is the ONE TIME I actually did something about my valuable time: I made finger sandwiches, all right. Sardine, cream cheese and a dash of hot sauce. They were pretty. Quite lovely. Inedible, to be sure, but I made them.

I'm angry today. I dislike being taken advantage of. I dislike people stealing from me. I forgot about the back up device from our first van...taken from our driveway. Yeah, that was costly!

My grandmother used to curse people who took from her. She once wished the woman who stole a ring from her...that her finger would get cancer and fall off. Yeah, it runs in the family. My mother was prone to denouncing folks who wronged her, too.

I don't wish things like that. Curses have a nasty habit of coming back on you.